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h-H comments on Think Before You Speak (And Signal It) - Less Wrong
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I agree that it would be a good idea to prevent hurting your credibility by signaling that you are either throwing out an idea to be torn apart or that you have thought long and hard about it. However, I still would err on the side of letting an idea out early. There are also downsides with thinking about an idea for too long :
A classical example is the Perpetuum Mobile. Time and time again there are people who believe that it will work. They invest time & money in something that's impossible as anyone with even a passing familiarity with thermodynamics can tell you.
I can only see one downside in letting it out early (besides hurt credibility) and that's that your future ideas will be taken less seriously. If you acquire a reputation for saying a lot of wrong and/or stupid ideas people will be quicker to just ignore you.
I think that the best way is to scrutinize your idea for basic soundness so that there are no obvious holes. Then the damage is minimal if it turns out to be wrong (obvious within your community off course. If you even dare to suggest Perpetuum Mobile with physicists if give you 5 seconds before they laugh you out in your face). Also, with the rise of the internet & libraries it's fairly easy to lookup if your idea wasn't already thought off and shot down.
valid points, but isn't it quite easy to see when thinking has gone on for 'too long' without benefit?
nitpick:"I still would error on the side of", err not error :_)
Corrected.
I suspect that in most cases you will be right. However, I know a woman in my street who is convinced that she's empath and can, quite literally, sense people emotions (in the telepathic kind of way, not the body language kind). The first time I met here I tried (naively maybe) to convince her that her ability is impossible. I told her of confirmation bias, unconscious cold reading, that the senses are not completely reliable and so on. It didn't help. At this point, she is so invested in it that she will reject anything that denies her ability.
My point is that if she would have taken the time to discuss this with people (or at least read up on counter arguments on her own) it's possible she wouldn't believe in it now.